The Goliath Power Saber is what every Star Wars fan has wanted for nearly 40 years—a lit-up, automatically extending and retracting light saber toy. Amazingly, Hasbro licensed the inventor's design and spent years developing it as an official Star Wars product only to abandon it, and the off-brand result exists only because the inventor was canny enough to have a reversion clause in their contract.
Yair Shilo tells The Verge it took five years just to figure out the right formula for a safely collapsing automatic blade, starting with prototypes made of paper and tin foil. He says he sold newspapers, trimmed lawns, and cleaned swimming pools while he worked on his Star Wars childhood dream,eventually rallying a cousin and an investment group behind a provisional patent in 2019.
I bet Hasbro's own lawyers ruined everything with a fluffed risk analysis.
Check out this publicity photo, which definitely doesn't have anything to do with Disney intellectual property.
